When a travel agent plans specific travel arrangements in response to a customer's general itinerary, the agent must consider the interests of various parties. An individual traveler may have his or her own travel preferences, such as, for example, flying exclusively on an airline having a frequent flyer program in which the traveler participates. Similarly, if the traveler is employed by a particular business entity, that entity may have its own preferences for any travel which is work-related. For example, a corporation may limit travel expenditures to business class or tourist class rates, and/or require that its employees use only certain travel services vendors (e.g., a particular airline or hotel chain). Furthermore, a travel agency may have its own preferences as to what travel arrangements are booked for its customers. For example, an airline may provide a travel agency with a block of seats on a particular flight that are for sale exclusively by the travel agency. This practice, known as space banking, guarantees the travel agency commission on those seats. Consequently, the travel agency has an incentive to sell all seats in the block.
A travel agent is expected to resolve any differences that arise when the preferences of the various parties discussed above do not coincide. This process of resolution is inefficient because the travel agent must spend time to manually determine a travel plan that is satisfactory to all the parties. In other words, during the process of manual resolution, the travel agent is unable to serve other customers, thereby reducing the agent's productivity. Furthermore, when the traveler and the traveler's employer are both customers of the travel agency, a travel agent can be placed in the awkward position of upsetting one customer in order to satisfy another.